We got a promising email dubbed "New web 2.0 art project" and arrived at the Art Initials website, a place where you can buy initials in all the combinations you can think of (about 676) and hope some wealthy sap 20 years down the line will go, "By Gad, I've been looking for that AN all over the place! I'll give you a thousand times what you paid for it."

The pressie soothingly states you are not obliged to buy your own initials, but popular ones do go for more money. Plus there's a nifty feature where, via Wikipedia, the website tells you what your chosen initials mean in contemporary life.

The hope is that by pushing a limited selection of initials, and selling popular ones at a higher rate, a "community" will flourish that outlasts the actual service. We can see that happening. Friendships are made over shared acts of stupidity all the time.

While we can appreciate the effort put into this DraftFCB Irvine online work for Taco Bell, Fourth Meal, which presents itself as a late night resource for night owls, it's a bit kludgey considering the hundreds of other similar online efforts which have come before it. Doing the Taxicab confessions thing, visitors can ride a cab around the city, check out late night hot spots added by users and record their own confessions for upload. Maybe Dunkin' gave us a decaf this morning by mistake but this just isn't hitting us.

This fall Scripps Howard is going to start publishing a free magazine called Skirt! for "educated and empowered women." Men who appear in the publication have to wear a ... well, we'd hate to ruin the surprise.

On our merry way to infantilizing everything in sight while demonstrating our educated- and empowered-ness, we think it would be a great idea to push the first 100 issues of Skirt! with a riding crop.

That way, we have something to snap maliciously if the laddies forget to cross their legs while sitting.

The OLPC, an organization devoted to bringing open source laptops to children in Third World countries for less than $200 a pop, have discovered an awkward residual outcome in their well-meaning scheme.

The News Agency of Nigeria has reported some kids at an Abuja primary school "have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials."

Oops. The OLPC has since reported they'll be including porn filters in the newer models of the otherwise-durable computers.

According to Copyranter, American Apparel has run out of ideas. No longer toying with masturbation, foot fetishes or witty word play, the retailer is left with nothing but women bending over while wearing tights. Comparatively, this recent ad is so tame it could almost be mistaken for and American Airlines ad.

It looks like the creative brief for this Dodge Nitro viral wannabe fell into the hands of some art director's second cousin twice removed who just graduated from the college of middle school humor. Are we supposed to laugh? To cringe? To utter a collective WTF? Oh wait. It's Dutch. That might explain. OK. Kidding. Seriously. Kidding.

UPDATE: Looks like the Dodge corporate folk weren't too pleased with this spot and asked that it be removed from YouTube. Not must to miss though. Just a dog pissing on the Nitro's wheel and then receiving an electrical shock from the Nitro.

We thought we'd seen the last of the (oft spoofed) (red) campaign but on the streets of New York, the red plague remains alive and well.

It made its most recent appearance in this Converse ad at left, touting (red) products as weapons of change. For those who can't read the blurry photo, the ad says, "Buy (Product) Red stuff. Join the movement. The time is now. Do something."

For a bold headline like "Weapon of Change," that follow-up entreaty leaves much to be desired. The only thing we feel genuinely compelled to do is trash the copywriter who put that desperate string of sentences together.

Oh how those faux blog-loving marketers will never learn (until, of course, they're pummeled by transparency police. Read on). Attention, marketers. Repeat after us: "The consumer is not an idiot. The consumer in not an idiot. The consumer is not..." OK? Good. Now that you're all cured, let's all revel in the glory of faux-lover supreme, our friends over at Sony who, along with several other movie studios and companies, has just launched Hollywood in Hi-Def, a site that praises the visual and aural deliciousness of high definition DVDs.

And if Chase Bank is any indication, those casualties come in literacy. Or maybe just vowels. It's hard to say. Maybe we should just leap ahead, cut out all the extra letter-looking things (uh, consonants, right?) and go back to hieroglyphs. We're halfway there anyway.